Bioplastic Re/upcycling: Sustainability

The global use of bioplastics entered our everyday lives as a proposed sustainable potential that can be used to overcome the environmental impact that conventional plastics have. Adopting such an alternative is a powerful tool as these materials are becoming more prevalent and continuously dominating and outperforming similar materials used worldwide. Notably, not all bioplastics are biodegradable, and this is highly dependent on the environment. Meanwhile some are recalcitrant to even undergo recycling processes; therefore, recombinant methods can be used to re/upcycle these materials and make them user-end friendly or produce high valuable products. This chapter reviews and highlights several re/upcycling methods like chemical, mechanical, biological, enzymatic, and microbial processes that have been proposed and are continuously being researched, but each method requires certain conditions and stimuli for a specific plastic material to be properly recycled. It also shows how each method affects the end product produced after the process.